Viewpoint: Hurricane Sandy, a Reminder of the Need for Speed
How bad is the flooding, Joe? That's what I wanted to know during a cell-phone call in the days after Sandy hit. I was talking with a long-term tenant of mine, a retired fire chief, about the condition of the small apartment building I own in Ventnor, a hard-hit New Jersey shore town."Two feet," Joe answered. The building sits on high ground, but when the electricity died, so did the building's sump pump. Two feet of water is one foot beyond the threshold to flood our elevated boiler system, which likely would deprive my tenants of heat and hot water—that is, whenever they would be allowed to return to their evacuated homes.
What we did to fix this problem shows, once again, the need to emphasize speed in critical-path-method scheduling. Much CPM software today is written to conserve project resources and save money, not to finish quickly.